1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and systems for the identification of circuits and circuit designs, and in particular, to placing identifiers in circuits and circuit designs.
2. Description of the Related Art
Intellectual property is playing an increasingly important role in the development and economy of modern societies. By way of example, intellectual property includes such essential areas as software, hardware, circuit designs, biotechnology, and media, such as television, cinema, music, books, and magazines. The increase in importance of intellectual property has been met with corresponding efforts to misappropriate, counterfeit, or steal intellectual property. Intellectual property in the form of digital data, such as music stored on CDs or software code, has been a particularly attractive target as perfect or near perfect copies of the original material may be made by thieves or counterfeiters.
With regard to circuit designs, intellectual property in the form of reusable cores (macro blocks for complex integrated circuits) has recently emerged as one of the most important components in the design process. The enormous growth of both circuit applications and implementation technologies has outpaced the design productivity of conventional design synthesis processes. Thus, the reuse of sophisticated and complex cores and software is needed to meet the demands of future developments, such as ultra large-scale integration. The trend towards the development and standardization of reusable cores is evidenced by the creation of the Virtual Socket Initiative Alliance™ which is directed to the development of an architecture for the reuse of functional circuit design blocks. One example of a functional block, that may be designed by one company and licensed or sold for use in products from other companies, is a signal processing core. Such a core may be used in a modem, a disk controller, a cellular device, and so on. Thus, the companies using the licensed core are spared the time, cost, and risk of developing their own signal processor circuit design.
However, in order to encourage the use of such reusable cores it is important to ensure that the core designs are not stolen or improperly distributed. Currently, it is often difficult to determine if a device is utilizing a stolen design. Thus, it is often difficult and expensive for an intellectual property owner to protect his or her rights.